August 2009

YOU HAVE MY ETERNAL RESPECT if you can spot the “Frisky Dingo” reference.

If you can’t spot that, then I’m sure you’ve ALSO spotted the lack of a conclusion to the “My Fucking Raygun” story. Yes, I’m actually working on it. No, it’s not COMPLETELY done. No, I can’t guarantee it’ll happen next week.

To be fair, though, I was doing the MFR stories completely on a tablet, and that takes a long fucking time. For the most part, everything else I’ve done for Peculiar Comics has been primarily accomplished using pencil and paper, with some digital editing and finishing flourishes.

I like doing these little black and white “slice of life” stories (because it’s a well-known fact that hook-ups with aliens happen way more often than you’d care to admit) because they’re different than what I usually draw and write, and VERY different than what I usually read. Granted, my past two reads have been Asterios Polyp, which you should go out and buy if you haven’t already, and the third volume Love & Rockets, which you should also read if you haven’t already…especially since L&R‘s been around for…oh, almost a quarter century now. These stories are also completely hand-done. Granted, I do adjust the levels a tad in Photoshop, but that’s only to fix what the scanner has botched.

Next week, you’ll see either the conclusion to “My Fucking Raygun” or the true story of how I met my girlfriend of two and a half years.

DUE TO A COMPLICATED* SCHEDULING ERROR, Vol. 2, No. 7 will be late, as in up next week. Instead, enjoy the one I had done for next week. It’s drastically different, I know, but I wanted to try something more slice-of-life (sorta) with less focus on detail and more on simply telling a story and/or telling a story simply.

…and while, yes, this was inspired by things that happened to me in grade school, I’m not a bitter person. Promise.

*And by “complicated”, I mean involving a combination of late space shuttles, doppleganger incidents, and historical retcons.

LIKE I SAID BEFORE, TO QUOTE BOB DYLAN in the most cliche way possible, “The times they are a-changin'”.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with color in comics, more specifically, a limited color pallet. In a portfolio I’m working on, I’m utilizing only primary colors (to obtain other colors, I adjust the transparencies of the colors in Photoshop). Here (and with the strips to follow), I expanded my color pallet to secondary colors and slightly darker versions of some colors for shading. I’m doing this partially as a way to fine-tune my skills with my new Bamboo tablet.

I also wanted to experiment with a vertical strip format, as well as working in a higher resolution (Volume One wasn’t scanned in at 300 dpi, so even if there WERE interest to print them down the line, they’d look crappy; Volume Two is here to fix that).

Feedback? Is this a good change? Were things better before? Should I quit now and dock off my hands?